I am a member of the Data Management, Exploration and Mining and Cloud Systems groups in the eXtreme Computing Group in Microsoft Research. I work on various aspects database systems, mostly related to data integration and transaction processing.
For the past 20 years, I have worked on data integration, and for the past ten in the context of my Model Management Project. The long term goal is to make database systems easier to use for model-driven applications, such as design tools, message translators, and database translators. The recent project focus is object-to-relational mapping, especially in support of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Over the years, this work has been done in close collaboration with Sergey Melnik (now at Google) and James Terwilliger (Microsoft), and with Suad Alagic (Univ. of Southern Maine), Alon Halevy (Google), Jayant Madhavan (Google), René Miller (Univ. of Toronto), Peter Mork (MITRE Corp.), Rachel Pottinger (Univ. of British Columbia), Christoph Quix (Technical Univ. of Aachen), Erhard Rahm (Univ. of Leipzig), Adi Unnithan (Microsoft), and many great interns.
My early research was primarily on transaction processing and, after a long hiatus, I resumed working in this area in 2006. I was a co-designer of the database engine for SQL Azure and of Hyder, a prototype transactional indexed-record manager that scales out without partitioning. Currently, I'm working on a closely-related project on distributed systems middleware, called Orleans. I have also published the following two books on transaction processing.
- Principles of Transaction Processing (2nd edition), coauthored with Eric Newcomer, was published in June 2009 by Morgan-Kauffman Publishers, a division of Elsevier. Translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
- Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems, coauthored with Vassos Hadzilacos and Nathan Goodman, is downloadable for free from here.
I've published many research papers on transaction processing, data integration, and other aspects of database management. You can find a nearly-complete list at the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography.
Professional Activities
- Affiliate Professor at University of Washington, where I teach CSEP 545 Transaction Processing.
- Editor in Chief: The VLDB Journal
- Member of the National Academy of Engineering. Member of the Board of Directors of Washington State Academy of Sciences.
- Editorial Board member: Information Systems, World Wide Web: Internet and Web Information Systems, Data-Centric Systems & Applications, OMICS - A Journal of Integrative Biology.
- Recent conference program committees: SIGMOD 2013, ICDE 2013, CIDR 2013, SIGMOD 2012, SIGMOD 2010; VLDB 2012 E&A; VLDB 2009 E&A PC and panel co-chair; ICDE 2008 PC; SIGMOD 2008 PC; ER 2008 PC
- Advisory Boards: PVLDB Advisory Board; SIGMOD Advisory Board; Computing Research Association (CRA): Finance Committee
- Emeritus: Technical Advisory Board member, Institute of Technology, University of Washington, Tacoma; Computing Research Association (CRA): Treasurer, Member of the Board of Directors; Member of the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Applications (The National Academies); Journal of Web Semantics Editorial Board Member.
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
Email: philbe@microsoft.com
Phone: (425) 706-2838
Fax: (425) 708-2587
